Poetry
(or what people did before there were movies)
In 30 Seconds
The Renaissance
 "Renaissance," French for "rebirth," perfectly describes
the intellectual and economic changes that occurred
in Europe from the fourteenth through the sixteenth
centuries.
 During the era known by this name, Europe emerged
from the economic stagnation of the Middle Ages and
experienced a time of financial growth.
 Also, and perhaps most importantly, the Renaissance
was an age in which artistic, social, scientific, and
political thought turned in new directions.
The Protestant Reformation
 During the Renaissance, a churchman named Martin
Luther changed Christianity. On October 31, 1517, he went
to his church in the town of Wittenburg, Germany, and
posted a list of things that worried him about the church.
 His list included the church's practice of selling
indulgences, a means by which people could pay the
church to reduce the amount of time their souls must
spend in purgatory instead of atoning for their sins via
contrition.
 Luther also requested that, when appropriate, Mass be said
in the native language instead of in Latin so that the
church's teachings would be more accessible to the people
Two Schools of Thought Emerged
 The secular, humanist idea held that the church should not
rule civic matters, but should guide only spiritual matters.
The church disdained the accumulation of wealth and
worldly goods, supported a strong but limited education,
and believed that moral and ethical behavior was dictated
by scripture.
 Humanists, however, believed that wealth enabled them to
do fine, noble deeds, that good citizens needed a good,
well-rounded education (such as that advocated by the
Greeks and Romans), and that moral and ethical issues
were related more to secular society than to spiritual
concerns.
In Under a Minute
Before There was Sexting . .
 During the age of Elizabeth, painting was dominated
by portraiture, particularly in the form of miniatures,
while elaborate textiles and embroidery prevailed.
Intended for private viewing, portrait miniatures were
highly personal and intimate objects that often
depicted lovers or mistresses.
Keeping up With the Joneses . . .
 In the decorative arts, demand for domestic silver
significantly increased during the mid-sixteenth
century because of rapid growth in population and
subsequent expansion of the middle and upper classes.
The Museum's silver salt, characteristic of Elizabethan
plate, is decorated with a melody of embossed
sculptural vegetal forms, fruit, grotesque figures, and
strapwork, topped with a figure finial to help vertically
emphasize its placement on a table.
But How Did They Breathe?
 But, as is always the case, there were artists who made
large-scale, full-length paintings that portrayed the
noble class in richly decorative costumes with armor,
embroidery, ruffs, hunting gear, weapons, and lace.
These intricate designs of foliage and patterning were
also applied to suits of armor.
Now Pay Attention . . .
 "Pastoral" (from pastor, Latin for "shepherd") refers to a
literary work dealing with shepherds and rustic life.
Pastoral poetry is highly conventionalized; it presents an
idealized rather than realistic view of rustic life.
 Classical (Greek and Latin) pastoral works date back to the
3rd century B.C., when the Greek poet Theocritus wrote
his Idylls about the rustic life of Sicily for the sophisticated
citizens of the city of Alexandria.
 In the first century B.C., Virgil wrote Latin poems
depicting himself and his equally sophisticated friends and
acquaintances as shepherds living a simple, rural life.
 Common topics of pastoral poetry include love and
seduction;
 The value of poetry;
 Death and mourning;
 The corruption of the city or court vs. the "purity"
of idealized country life;
 Politics (generally treated satirically:
 The "shepherds" critique society or easily identifiable
political figures).
 The affectation of rustic life in pastoral poetry is a
purely artistic device; it creates a distancing effect
which allows the poet to step back from and critique
society.
 The artificiality of pastoral poetry is most explicit in
the courtly language and dress of the "shepherds,"
which better fit the drawing rooms of polite society
than the hills, swamps and sheepfolds of real rustic
life.
Eclogue
 A common pastoral poetic genre is a dialogue between
two shepherds.
 This conversation may be between a shepherd and the
shepherdess he loves (generally his attempt to seduce
her).
 As was common of Elizabethan poets, Marlowe plays
with the traditional pastoral formula.
 He introduces sexuality and includes images that
make the shepherd’s plea seem ridiculous rather than
ideal.
The Beginning
 Romanticism has very little to do with things popularly
thought of as "romantic.“
 Rather, it is an international artistic and philosophical
movement that redefined the fundamental ways in
which people in Western cultures thought about
themselves and about their world.
 The early Romantic period thus coincides with what is
often called the "age of revolutions"--including, of
course, the American (1776) and the French (1789)
revolutions--an age of upheavals in political,
economic, and social traditions, the age which
witnessed the initial transformations of the Industrial
Revolution. A revolutionary energy was also at the core
of Romanticism, which quite consciously set out to
transform not only the theory and practice of poetry
(and all art), but the very way we perceive the world.
 And in the early years of 1789–95, the enthusiasm for
the Revolution had the impetus and high excitement
of a religious awakening, because they interpreted the
events in France in accordance with the apocalyptic
prophecies in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures;
that is, they viewed these events as fulfilling the
promise, guaranteed by an infallible text, that a short
period of retributive and cleansing violence would
usher in an age of universal peace and blessedness that
would be the equivalent of a restored Paradise.
A Detailed Overview
 Until 1830, England was primarily an agrarian society.
 There still held two primary social levels: Nobility and
gentry on top and commoners and peasants on the
bottom. There was very little, if any, in the middle.
 These sects had, for the most part, an amicable
relationship.
The Pawns
 Primogenitor
 Chattel
 2nd Sons
 Life in the big City – 3 million large
 The Sinners
Queen Victoria
 The original Paris Hilton
 Then along came Prince Albert
 Morality
 The Crystal Palace
 Imperialization: 1/3 of the world’s population
 Decadence was a cultural attitude manifested in the
late nineteenth century, containing two primary
features:
 A belief that certainty in knowledge, science, morality,
and society was gone, which demanded a new attitude
in life and art to compensate for the loss of certainty,
an attitude that privileged sensations, impressions,
epiphanies over systematic theorizing
 That art and morality were distinct realms. Art was
completely autonomous, free of ethical boundaries.
Decadence: The Antithesis of
Progress
 The 19th century lived through earth shattering
advances:
 in industrial production (industrial revolution,
capitalist accumulation);
 social organization (bourgeois revolutions and class
warfare, imperialist expansion and the rise of nation
states, urbanization, the factory system);
 scientific and intellectual advancement (e.g.
evolutionary theory, positivism, historical materialism,
the philosophical systems of Hegel and others);
 and technological revolutions (telegraph, telephone,
railroads, electricity).
• The furiously energetic march of progress generated a kind
of blind faith in the promises of science and technology to
solve our ills through the machinations of social
engineering, a devoted allegiance to the pleasures of
commodity fetishes and consumption, and the voracious
appetite for knowledge, while at the same time the
upheaveals brought on by revolutionary change
engendered a world weariness, an overwhelmed sense of
ennui in intellectual and artistic circles (not to mention
the very real suffering and hardship felt among the
proletariat and subjugated peoples of the globe on the
wrong side of imperialistic accumulation).